Attempts to achieve low temperature nuclear fusion can be traced to the work of Paneth, Peters, and Tanberg in 1927 . Martin Fleischmann, who in his early career was a colleague of Paneth teamed with Stanley Pons at the University of Utah to pursue this goal by the electrolysis of heavy water with a palladium cathode. Palladium is a metal which strongly absorbs hydrogen isotopes. The question they sought to answer was whether the internal pressure generated by this absorption would be sufficient to overcome the coulomb repulsion of deuterium nuclei. In 1989 they claimed success in fusing deuterium nuclei to form helium 2 Their main evidence for this claim was excess heat which was orders of magnitude higher than could be explained by any known chemical reaction.

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